Workshop II — Key Criteria

Criteria chosen after options exist are preferences in disguise. Workshop II fixes the judgement standard first: what must this workplace achieve, in what priority, measured how — derived from the evidence account, the success criteria from leadership interviews, and the accepted demand priorities. When Workshop III compares options and Workshop IV confirms a concept, the criteria do the deciding. This is trade-off governance made operational: the ranking forces the organisation to state, before it is politically expensive, what it values most.

• Directly after Workshop I, while the shared evidence account is fresh
• Before any option generation — the sequence is the method
• Revisited only if new evidence materially changes the demand position, and then explicitly

• The same co-creation group as Workshop I — continuity is essential
• Leadership team delegates with mandate to commit to rankings
• Finance delegate: criteria without a cost dimension produce concepts without a business case

• Shared evidence account from Workshop I
• Consolidated workplace success criteria from Leadership Interviews
• Aligned demand priorities (structural versus desirable)
• Strategic tension register and the selected scenario's constraints
• Sentiment register: the findings the strategy committed to answer

1. Derive candidate criteria from the evidence, not from brainstorm: every criterion must trace to a finding, an accepted priority or a committed constraint.
2. Make each criterion decidable: 'supports collaboration' is a wish; 'provides measured overlap capacity for the eight interdependent team clusters at their required rhythm' is a criterion. Force the conversion in-session.
3. Attach a measurement logic to each criterion — how will an option be scored against it, with what evidence?
4. Rank through forced trade-off: paired comparisons or weighted allocation, so the group cannot declare everything essential. The ranking is the workshop's product; an unranked list is a failed session.
5. Test the ranking against the tension register: does it decide the tensions, or restate them? Each major tension should be resolvable by consulting the ranking.
6. Stress-test with scenarios of conflict: 'an option scores highest on experience and worst on cost — what does our ranking say?' If the room overrides its own ranking, the ranking is wrong; fix it now.
7. Record the criteria set with rankings, measurement logic and evidence lineage; obtain formal leadership acceptance.

• Criteria inflation: fifteen criteria means no criteria — hold the line near seven to ten
• Undecidable virtue criteria that every option will 'meet'
• Rankings that avoid the real trade-offs by ranking only the uncontroversial
• Finance absent from the weighting, guaranteeing a criteria-versus-budget collision later
• The politically astute move of accepting criteria while planning to fight the options

• Ranked key criteria set with measurement logic per criterion
• Evidence lineage per criterion
• Trade-off resolution record: how the ranking decides the registered tensions
• Formal leadership acceptance

Workshop III scores options against exactly this set; Workshop IV confirms the concept by reference to it. The criteria carry into the Workplace Strategy as its judgement framework and into Recalibrate as the performance dimensions the delivered workplace is measured against. The Conceptual Pillars in Deliver are, in large part, these criteria rendered as principles.

Converting wishes into decidable criteria is analytical craft; getting a room to genuinely rank them is political craft. Judging when a ranking reflects conviction versus fatigue, and whether the group is committing or performing commitment, determines whether Workshops III and IV decide anything at all.

• Generating criteria by brainstorm instead of deriving them from evidence
• Accepting an unranked list to keep the peace
• Criteria without measurement logic, making Workshop III scoring theatre
• Skipping the conflict stress-test, so the ranking fails at first contact with a real option
• Treating the criteria as the strategist's to write and the group's to applaud

A technology firm's session produced nine criteria. The forced ranking placed 'team overlap capacity' above 'individual setting choice' — narrowly, after genuine argument. In Workshop III, the two leading options split exactly along that line, and the ranking decided it in twenty minutes. The CFO later cited the criteria session as the moment the project 'stopped being about taste': the decision had been made before the options existed, which is precisely the method.